I've been doing a little reading up on JSON today, and am updating my postal code project to output JSON and make it easier to use with AJAX technology. More on this project when I get something actually working good…
Remember the chipmunk? I caught him this past weekend!
I sent out an email to the office, letting everyone know the rodent menace is gone. Here's what I wrote (with some name editing):
For those of you that don't know, Friday we spotted a chipmunk running through the office, hiding in and under cubicles, chewing on the power cables, sniffing data packets, and being a general nuisance. My first thought was corporate espionage--he'd been sent by a competitor to muck up the works. I procured a trap, and with some particularly tasty bait (peanuts ala JS), set about to catch him when he got the munchies. By Sunday the chipmunk succumbed to the aroma of food, much like employees around 9am on the weekdays, and was caught. I interrogated him and found he didn't know anything about software at all, but discovered he was an advance scout for a chipmunk invasion. After negotiating a non-aggression treaty with the chipmunk representative I released him in the wild. He promised we wouldn't see any more of them, and I told him if I did I'd take them to meet my cat, so I think we're pretty safe now.
Snacks are distributed in the break room around 9am every weekday, to explain the inside joke.
You don't have to be a computer expert to play this game!
Spot the problem with this computer part:
Yes, that is a burnt ATX power connector, the part that feeds power to the motherboard. This happened to my wife's uncle.
Sorry for the focus, my cell phone's camera isn't terribly great.
Today, an advance scout for a chipmunk invasion force was spotted in our sales office. I flushed it out from behind a filing cabinet, but Amy (who was holding our paper shopping bag trap) freaked out when it ran into the bag and she let it get away. I pursued it out into the hallway and halfway up the stairs to the other offices. Beautiful, it's SEP now (Somebody Else's Problem).
Well, not quite. It came back downstairs and was running around the tech support office, freaking out all the women. We called the Fish and Game department, and they loan out live traps for a $20 deposit. Twenty minutes later I've baited and set it and we're waiting to drop the hammer.
One of our support technicians asked what I was going to do with it when I caught it, and I replied I have a cat at home…
That got me in to trouble. No, I won't feed him to my cat (as much fun as he would have with it). I'll set it free outside so it can run up one of the few remaining trees around the new Federal Courthouse.
I fixed a couple of issues yesterday with my theme and its XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance. It should validate fine now.
I mentioned my drywall project in the bathroom before, and thought I'd post a picture of it. Ignore the open-wall part—that's where the mosaic is going to be. The patch extends 6 inches above where you see the hole in the wall.
I modified a picture to show you where the actual line is, you can see it here.
Today I got my Two Gallon Donor pin from the Blood Bank. I promised I'd write about my good experience this time, since my most popular entry was about my bad donation experience a little over two years ago.
Strangely enough, the worst part of the whole process for me has always been the finger-poking needle stick. The INBC has these new finger-pokers that you can barely feel now! I always dreaded the finger poke part, but now it's a snap.
Today things went smoothly, there were no lines (there usually aren't many people donating blood), and the interview questions are the easiest test to pass.
Unfortunately for me, every time I go they have to go through this giant book and look up the countries I've been to to make sure I'm not contaminated by something nasty. They give you a short line for the countries you've been to in the last three years, I have to cram everything in with small letters. Here's my "past three years" list:
- France
- England
- Ireland
- Jamaica
- Italy
- Croatia
- Greece
- Turkey
I have a relatively rare blood type (A-), so they like me to come in as often as I can. I have been donating regularly since a friend of mine was severly injured in a car accident in 2004.
Today's my brother Sam's birthday. He just got home from being stuck in Italy. He really was stuck, there was a transportation strike and he couldn't get back to Rome on the train and missed his flight.
I have a totally cool birthday present for you Sammo. I told Jodie about it and she said you'd love it. I just need a way to get it to you. I guess Mom's coming up here this Saturday, so perhaps I'll leave it with her and she can bring it back to you.
I got back from Seattle to find more wasps squatting under the eave again! I can't believe they just came right back! I sprayed their new nest, hopefully I'll be able to knock it all down and be done with these buggers.
Today I also got the texturing done on my drywall patching project (yay! now we can paint, like we wanted to in the first place!). It looks a lot better than I think it should, me being an amateur and all. Now that it's almost dried, you can hardly tell where the lines are!
Saturday, while in Seattle, I finally got my copy of å€šå¤©å± é¾è¨˜ by 金庸 (Jin Yong's Yi Tian Tu Long Ji, or The Heaven Sword Dragon Sabre Chronicles). I first read this story while I lived in China back in 1997. At the time, I could only find the simplified Chinese version. I now have the traditional version that fits in with the other 金庸 books that I have. I'm trying to collect the whole series before they stop printing this version.
Reading these stories is a bit of a challenge, but they're a great way for me to keep up my Chinese.
Here are a couple of pictures I took last night and this morning.
Check out the gun on this Coast Guard boat!
A picture of some boats docked in the harbor
I could just see the pigu end of a cruise ship that showed up here last night from my hotel room:
True story! I was driving on I90 to Seattle today (I just checked into my hotel), and somewhere between Moses Lake and Ellensburg came up on a couple of motorcycles. I asked Adam (he rode over with me) what does she have on her helmet? (the 2nd biker had a long, braided pony tail). Something was sticking up off her helmet that looked like an antenna, but it was taped down with what may well have been duct tape.
When I passed her and we could see her from the front, we realized it was a tiara, all sparkly and white, stuck to the top of her helmet. She was the biker princess.
I'm off to Seattle tomorrow morning, I gots me a seminar to go to.
Ben, I responded to your comment you left earlier today and left my contact info, give me a call if you have some time to meet up and get some dinner or something. This will be a quick trip, over Saturday morning and back Sunday night, but it'll be nice to avoid the heat we're experiencing in Coeur d'Alene right now…
Just a word of advice to any UN*X/Linux people out there. I have done this for a while now, but forgot about it until today (when I needed it), when it saved my bacony pirate pigu:
Take the important contents of your /etc/fstab file and write it on a sticky note. Stick that to your hard drive in the computer. Two years down the road when you don't remember what your partitioning table looks like and you have a crash like I did today, it will save you tons of trouble. Here's what mine looks like:
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 /dev/sda2 swap /dev/sda3 / XFS
Scurvy Jake's Pirate Blog was broadsided today by the hard drive pirates!
Eleven hours later (with a driving range/frustration break at 3pm—man that was hot!) we're back up and running smooth.
What happened was I lost my drive partition's superblock. Shout outs to Cray (yes, THAT Cray!) for having good XFS documentation. I was able to rescue my system and didn't have to resore everything on to a new system from backup, although I was preparing to. It's nice to have backups to fall back on (YES I make regular backups!), but it's less time-consuming to keep your existing system and not migrate tons of settings.
I got my drive back, my /home partition was on a different drive (a good backup in itself, by the way), so all that data was safe.
So all in all, I lost a day of productivity, but was able to completely recover from a very serious error and, at the same time, test my backup procedures.
Basically, I figure I can't tell people to back up their data if I don't do it myself. Because I do back up everything important, I can laugh at other people that lose their data because they don't take the time to make backups. I laugh doubly-hard at IT people that lose data due to not backing it up, they of all people should know better!